the personal (and mostly parenthetical) asides of Jake Nassif.

Seeing what’s really there

In the New Yorker’s profile of Gil Scott-Heron this week, “New York Is Killing Me,” the artist is dead-on about everything, even as he’s smoking crack in his darkened apartment. “The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing you can see. I am the person I see least over the course of my life, and even what I see is not accurate.” I always identified with Scott-Heron’s “Whitey On The Moon“: the more swept up people are in whatever it is, the more indignant I feel about it.
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Nicholas, a 10 year old who lives across the alley, loves elevators and can rattle off makes and models like other kids talk about video games. He and his dad go downtown together to ride them.
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Sarah’s helping me reinvigorate a long-stalled project, “Longfellow Bingo”—a scavenger hunt for our neighborhood’s quirky, homey character. I didn’t get much past “Subarus,” “prayer flags” “push mowers” and “obsolete businesses.” She came up with some of the rightest stuff so far, including “microhouses,” “mega-bird feeders” and “cats on leashes.”
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Vacationing in Ontario last week, we were playing Scrabble at sunset (I’d just played “Flexors”—bingo) when we noticed the aurora arrayed in full greenish-rippling effect across the northern horizon. There was also a meteor shower and Venus rising, but they paled by comparison.
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Johanna is combining letters into page after page of words and sentences that unfurl in four directions, heavy on the Hs, Rs and Os (they’re fun to read aloud, for example: HOILARRH OI LRRHHO A H). There is no story. To her, it’s enough that it resembles one.
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Somebody went to a lot of trouble to burn down a playground near our house. They managed to thoroughly destroy only a third of it, but now it all smells toxic and looks like a war zone. Jo is pissed.